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Baidu Reveals How It Will Conquer Indonesia

Global Marketing News – 1st October 2015

Baidu reveals how it will conquer Indonesia

The Chinese search giant Baidu has given details on how it intends to conquer the Indonesian market.

Last month, the tech company confirmed it would be focussing its attention on expanding to Indonesia, but no details were provided other than the fact it would focussing on a mobile-centric strategy.

Now, it has revealed that it will be primarily pushing its app store MoboMarket and its O2O services in the country.

MoboMarket is a Baidu-owned Android app store targeted at Indonesia which launched around 18 months ago. During that time, it has attracted 4 million monthly active users and half a million apps.

Travel, gaming and children’s apps are the most popular apps in the app store, with social media lagging slightly behind.

Baidu is also developing its O2O services in the country, a strategy similar to what it is doing in China. O2O, or online-to-offline services, are those which allow users to do a real-world activity online, such as taxi-hailing and ticket-booking apps.

Display and search advertising growing in Argentina

Research by Emarketer has predicted that display and search advertising will grow in Argentina over the next 4 years, at the expense of classifieds.

The digital advertising market in Argentina is currently worth an estimated 780 million US dollars, with 46% being spent on display ads, 38% being spent on search ads and 16% being spent on classifieds.

This is expected to rise to a staggering 2.2 billion US dollars by 2019, however, with the proportion being spent on display and search advertising rising by around 2% each and the proportion being spent on classifieds falling by 5%.

Argentina is the world’s fastest growing advertising market, and is currently the third largest advertising market in Latin America.

Mobile advertising is growing particularly fast in the country, with advertisers in the country set to triple their spending on mobile ads this year.

Over half of US Christmas shoppers to use social commerce

Over half of US internet users will use social media to some degree to do their Christmas shopping, according to research by Market Track.

The research found that 52% said that social media would form some part of their Christmas shopping experience, with over a third saying they would look for discounts on social networks.

A quarter said they would conduct product research on social sites, and an eighth said they would watch product videos on social sites.

When looking at specific networks, image-based sites such as Instagram and Pinterest are most popular for engaging in social ecommerce activities such as making wish lists.

However, only 9% of respondents said they would actually buy a product from a social media site, meaning that social commerce has plenty of room for growth.

Instagram second most popular social network in the world

Instagram has overtaken Twitter to be the second most popular social network in the world.

Instagram now has 400 million monthly active users, an increase of 100 million from the end of 2014.

This puts it above Twitter, which has 316 million monthly active users, and second only to Facebook, which recently surpassed 1 billion monthly active users.

Instagram saw its strongest growth in Europe and Asia, with Japan, Indonesia and Brazil being the top 3 countries in terms of growth.

A spokesperson from Instagram commented on the news, saying: “Our community has evolved to be even more global, with more than 75% living outside of the US.”

Google to introduce wi-fi to 400 Indian train stations

And finally, Google has announced that it will bring free, high-speed Wi-Fi to 400 train stations in India, providing internet access to 10 million Indians per day.

The plan forms part of the Digital India initiative, which aims to get the next billion Indians online.

It is not Google’s only project in India. It also recently released its cheap Android One phones in the country.

Gemma Houghton

Gemma has been working in international search for 6 years and leads Webcertain's marketing team. As well as managing Webcertain’s global online and offline marketing activities, she also organises and programs WebCertain's International Search Summit, a search marketing conference focusing on international and multilingual online marketing and contributes regularly to the Webcertain blog. She has also spoken at conferences such as SES and SasCon and writes regularly for State of Digital. Gemma holds a Professional Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing and a BA Joint Honors Degree in French and German.